


When We Kiss Our Scars Align

by matchsticks_p (matchsticks)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Smith/Wesson AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:04:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meet Sam Wesson. Meet a ghost. Meet more ghosts. Meet each other's parents. This is not how Dean Smith had imagined his life would go. (Note: AU from about three quarters of the way into "It's a Terrible Life". Sam and Dean are actually Wesson and Smith.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Kiss Our Scars Align

There's a weird guy at work who can't take a hint. He has massive shoulders that stretch out his IT department polo and he keeps managing to get into the elevator with Dean, even though Dean has told him clearly that he isn't interested. He just refuses to give up.

It's not that the guy is unattractive. He's very attractive, actually, and in a different context, a context where he isn't also his co-worker and subordinate, maybe a context where the guy doesn't keep talking intently about his banshee dreams, Dean might consider it.

If Dean is being totally honest, in a different context he'd do more than just consider it. The weird guy is fucking hot, and it's too bad he's a techie because you can't fuck around with the people who keep your computers running. Too risky. If things turn sour he and his friends could make Dean's operating systems a living hell. And it's too bad he's also obviously insane, because he's somehow caught Dean alone in an elevator again and he's saying, "I had another one of those dreams—"

"Listen, buddy," Dean says. "I've already told you, save it for—"

"You were in it," the guy blurts.

"What?"

"My dream." The guy ducks his head, finally looking a little bit sheepish but also looking just incredible with his hair all in his eyes like that. "I know it sounds weird, but you were in my dream, and we were hunting these evil ghosts…"

* * *

After watching Sandover's ghost burn screaming into oblivion, Dean's ready to admit that maybe Sam Wesson isn't so crazy after all. It's also pretty apparent that Sam saved him just in the nick of time, and Dean is almost violently turned on by the thought that _he owes Sam his life_. 

Adrenaline is still thrumming through his veins from the night's events, he's never been gladder to be alive, and crazy or not Dean must've still been a little bit right about Sam when he interpreted Sam's weird ghost stories as misguided pickup lines because Sam followed him back to his condo without question and Sam doesn't resist at all when Dean pushes him up against the kitchen counter.

There's still blood splattered all over Sam's shirt, from a security guard who was collateral damage. There are hard bits in Sam's hair, flecks of dried blood that he missed with his wet paper towel, and Dean can imagine him drenched in it, dark red all over his face and dripping off his chin. It's more than a little fucked up that the thought doesn't gross him out at all. It just makes him crush his mouth into Sam's, hard enough to hurt when their teeth collide. Sam tastes like sweat and aspartame and just a tiny hint of copper, and crimson flashes through Dean's mind again. It's terrible, the way it spurs him into grinding his tongue even harder against Sam's. Dean's pretty sure he doesn't have a thing for gore—it's just the adrenaline, the shock of brushing so close to death, someone else's blood as stark proof of what they narrowly avoided.

Sam certainly doesn't seem to have a problem with Dean's reaction. He pulls Dean in closer, drags his lips away from Dean's in order to bite his way along Dean's jaw, down Dean's throat to feel the pulse rushing past. His hands fumble at Dean's shirt and give up when it's only half off, unable to get Dean's cufflinks undone. Dean hardly notices, too busy getting down onto his knees, too busy unzipping Sam's flies. 

When he pulls Sam's cock out without even unbuttoning the top of his pants first, Sam almost collapses backwards. His hands scramble across the counter for purchase and Dean distantly hears his spice jars topple. Dean's need to have Sam's dick in his mouth overrides his usual desire to keep his kitchen need and tidy. He flattens his tongue against the hardness and closes his eyes to feel it all, the way Sam twitches, the way he bucks, the way he seems to thrust in time to Dean's heart beating in his temples. He grips Sam's thighs and feels his muscles shift through the scratchy material of his trousers. It's hot, Sam's skin and the blood under his skin and his neck under his collar and his kitchen and his condo and they are So. Fucking. Alive. 

Breathing is an aphrodisiac and when Sam rocks up uncontrollably once, twice, Dean has to clamp down on his inhalations so he doesn't choke. He presses the heel of his hand into his own cock, rubs harder than he normally would and doesn't think twice about ruining his boxers.

Afterwards, Dean spits into his kitchen sink and runs the water to wash Sam's come down the stainless steel drain. He makes a mental note to scour the sink with bleach before he uses it for cooking again. 

"Wow," Sam says. His clothes are rumpled but still completely on, save for his one undone zipper. His softening cock is hanging out of it, but he seems too flustered to notice or care. "That was." He clears his throat. "Yeah."

Dean feels for the handkerchief in the pocket of his blazer, crumpled on the floor where either he or Sam tossed it. The details are already a little fuzzy. He dabs at his lips until they're dry.

Sam's eyes stay on his mouth long after he's done cleaning it.

"Sorry about that," Dean says, gesturing toward his sink. "I usually swallow, but I'm on this Master Cleanse thing and I'm not supposed to have any protein."

Sam huffs a disbelieving laugh, then laughs louder when he realises Dean is being serious. "Dude, I wasn't going to—it's fine, whatever. I don't care if you swallow." He makes a half-hearted attempt at putting himself back together a little bit, smoothing his hair down and straightening his collar. He neglects to zip himself back up. "You should probably stop doing the Master Cleanse, though. It's just a fad diet. Only thing that gets rid of extra fat is exercise."

"What are you, a nutritionist now?"

Sam quirks an eyebrow at him, all 'look at me, I'm built like a warehouse full of tanks,' and Dean relents.

"Alright, so what exercises do you recommend?"

"If you want, we could go to the gym together sometime and I could show you."

As far as pickup lines go, it's pretty awful, but it's a big step up from the ghosthunting dream story so Dean doesn't say no.

* * *

Sam sends him an email on Friday afternoon with a link to a news article about recent strange deaths at an insurance company. _I did some looking around and it seems like these deaths are mirroring bizarre situations that got rejected for insurance claims. It's almost like someone's trying to prove a point that the claims weren't frauds, that you really can die that way. Only it would be hard to die like that without some "outside help" The office is only a half hour drive from your place. Wanna check it out this weekend?  
–Sam Wesson, Tech Support_

Dean's tempted to reprimand him for using the company email account for outside business, but then he reads the news report and some of the files Sam attached and it actually sounds like something might be going on, so he replies _Sure. Discuss it over dinner first?_

They have dinner at the sushi place Dean likes, because the person paying gets to choose. Or, at least, that's the reason Dean gives when Sam makes a face at all the raw fish and asks why they have to eat there. The real reason is that Dean wants to see if Sam knows how to use chopsticks. As suspected, he doesn't, and they look hilariously like tiny twigs gripped awkwardly in his huge fist. 

Dean invites Sam back to his condo under the pretence of continuing their research, only it's not even a pretence because they spend the next two hours watching every single video on the Ghostfacers website, even the werewolf ones. They only fuck after they've decided on a solid plan of attack: they'll snoop around, interview the deceased's co-workers, figure out who's doing the haunting, and then salt and burn their remains. 

Dean says Sam can stay the night because they have an early morning ahead of them. He stuffs his come-stained sheets into the washer while Sam takes a shower because he can't stand the thought of just leaving them all night. He's laying down crisp new sheets (dark blue striped with grey, thread count high but not insanely so because he's not hedonistic, he just enjoys living within his rather substantial means) when Sam comes back out of the bathroom naked but for a towel. It's a normal-sized towel, but Sam makes it look tiny and indecent. Dean has trouble tearing his eyes away from the muscles rippling around the V of Sam's hip bones.

"I, uh…I thought I sent you in there with some extra pyjamas?"

"They don't fit," Sam says.

Dean should probably have guessed they weren't going to. 

"I'm cool with sleeping naked," Sam says. "I usually do it in the summer anyway."

"You used my ginger and citrus body scrub," Dean says, incongruously. That scent is the only detail he's noticed that doesn't make him want to climb all over Sam. He figures if he just focuses on that, maybe he can pretend he has some semblance of self-control.

"Yeah, I didn't know what to use. It's like an army of bottles in there. I tried to pick the one that looked the least expensive."

"Ginger and citrus is for the morning. You should've used one of the nighttime moisturizing cleansers."

"Next time," Sam says. And then he drops his towel.

Dean learns a valuable lesson about not changing his sheets too quickly, when the night is still young enough for round two.

The first part of their first real hunt after Sandover is almost anti-climactic. All their hunches turn out to be spot on, and they've figured out whose spirit is haunting the insurance office before lunchtime. There are no tricks, no curveballs, no hidden surprises. The guy was buried in a nearby cemetery with a clearly marked tombstone so they don't even have to get creative in order to find his earthly remains.

And then they realise that the second part is going to be no fun at all. 

"Look, we knew it would probably come to this," Sam says, handing Dean a shovel. "That Ghostfacers video said."

"Yeah, but if we get caught—" Dean is worried as fuck, but he takes the shovel anyway like it comes to him naturally. They have to salt and burn the body before more people get killed. "Shouldn't we at least do this under the cover of darkness, or something? I mean, it's broad daylight. Any cop could just come walking by."

"This is creepy enough already, you really want to do this at night?"

Sam has a point. There doesn't seem to be anyone around right now, and if they get caught by the police in the middle of the night then they really will look like weirdo grave robbers. Dean sighs and sinks the blade of his shovel into the ground.

Digging is hard work. Dirt is heavy, especially the twentieth consecutive load of it when your shoulders are starting to scream at you to stop. Sam can dig faster for longer because he's a gorilla, but Dean's the one to break open the top of the casket when they finally hit it. Neither of them has ever seen a half-decomposed corpse before.

"Oh god, oh god, oh my god the salt the salt the salt quick." Dean scrabbles to light a match, face turned away, trying not to breathe or think too deeply, while Sam pours salt over the gnarled gooey wriggling grotesque wretched thing that they will all eventually become oh god don't think about it— He drops the lit match into the whole salted mess.

They watch it go up in flames and they both know that they're not imagining things when they hear a ghostly "noooooo" that burns off into the crackle of smoke. They're pretty happy with a job well done, but it seems disrespectful to high five each other after defacing a grave, so they just get the hell out of their before anyone sees them. 

Dean makes Sam scrape as much mud as possible off both shovels before he lets him put them back in his car, because he really doesn't want to have to get his trunk detailed. Sam does it with only minimal complaining. Dean blows him in his condo's underground parking lot, ostensibly to thank him for cleaning the shovels but really because Dean just wanted to.

* * *

The first time they go off script, Dean gets punched in the face by a yeti.

It was bound to happen sooner or later—not getting punched by a yeti, obviously, but going off script. He and Sam have begun to realise that there are a lot of monsters out in the world, monsters beyond the imagination of conventional science, and there are only so many of them the Ghostfacers can cover in their handy web tutorials. Sooner or later, they would run into something no one's fought before, and it finally happens one lovely, crisp weekend in November.

Some huge furry creature has been plucking shoppers out of the sprawling parking lot of a suburban warehouse store, picking them off like berries from a bush. Authorities are calling them mountain lion attacks, but Sam and Dean are starting to learn that the phrase "mountain lion attacks" is usually a screaming red flag for something supernatural, especially when they happen in a place no self-respecting mountain lion has ever set foot. From the eyewitness accounts, a few blurry photos, a very wobbly home video, and their own research, they've concluded that it's a yeti. They just have no idea how to deal with one.

It's already charging right at them when they find out that conventional bullets don't seem to do it any harm. They crash through the woods behind the store, great big roaring thing in hot pursuit, and Dean's by no means an expert at this hunting business yet but he's still pretty sure that running away from the monster is quite literally the opposite of what they're supposed to do.

"I hope you have a plan B, Mr. I-think-we-can-handle-it-how-hard-could-it-be," Dean huffs at Sam as he jumps a large log, just barely managing to make it over without faceplanting into the ground.

"I do," Sam says. "You distract it—I need to circle back around."

"Wait, what—" And then Dean finds himself running alone, Sam veering sharply off to the side.

The yeti pauses mid-lumber, unsure which one of them to follow now that they've split up. Dean waves his arms and makes a lot of noise, thinking it can't actually be that easy, but the yeti's interest is easily gained and then he's running again, chased by this thing that looks like a cross between a gorilla and an English sheepdog and 400 pounds of sheer appetite whose attention he voluntarily attracted.

"You're not doing your kind any favours," Dean mutters conversationally, scrambling through some thorny undergrowth and totally ruining his third-best gym pants. "There's this stereotype that big shaggy animals are dumb, and you are just perpetuating it."

The yeti nearly runs headlong into a tree when Dean fakes left and then takes a hard right, proving Dean's point about its intelligence.

It gets him back at the next sharp turn though, when he loses his footing just for a second and stumbles off the path he's somewhat attempting to follow. By the time he regains his equilibrium the yeti has swung its arm and cold clocked him in the face, sending him flying back on his ass. Dean has no idea what Sam's doing but he hopes he's doing it quickly, because he's winded and he can't feel half his face and he's not sure he can get up without the yeti knocking him right back down again. Almost as soon as he thinks it, the yeti makes a loud bellowing noise that sounds unsettlingly human and falls to the ground, hard enough to make the earth shake. 

Dean looks up to find Sam behind the yeti's prone body, a 'gotcha' look on his face and a tranquilizer gun in his hands.

"What did you—"

"Big game tranquilizers, the kind wardens use for bears," Sam says.

Dean can see three darts sticking comically out of the yeti's rump. 

"But how—real bullets don't work, but tranquilizers do? How did you figure that out?"

"I didn't know for sure. I just thought it would be worth a try. Because, you know, it's basically like a bear—the only reason it's been attacking people lately is because the spread of human development has encroached on its territory, depleting it of its natural habitat and prey. These things have lived far away from humans for hundreds of years and everything's been just fine. It's only because urban expansion increases contact that violent yeti-human confrontations happen."

Dean stares.

"My mom's an environmental lawyer," Sam says, going a bit pink around the ears. 

"So you're saying even though this thing eats people, it's really the victim here," Dean says sceptically.

"Well no, it's not like I'm saying we should keep letting it eat people."

"And what do you propose we do with it now?"

"…You're not going to like this," Sam warns.

He's right. Dean doesn't like it. 

Sam makes them load the unconscious monster into Dean's car so they can drive it out into the mountains in order to relocate it. Dean's trunk isn't big enough, and they have to lay the yeti out on the back seat. It's covered with all the detritus of living in the wild outdoors, and it has a strong, gamey musk, and its drooling a bit onto the fine grain leather of Dean's upholstery, and they are so taking Sam's shitty car for hunts from now on.

Sam coughs and delicately reminds Dean that the only reason they haven't been taking his car all this time is because Dean himself claimed it didn't have all the necessary comforts for long drives, like heated seats and satellite radio. He trails off and looks politely out the window when Dean glares.

"I can't believe we're doing this," Dean mutters. His face still really, really hurts where the yeti hit him. He grips the steering wheel harder than strictly necessary. "Like, I can't believe we're actually doing this. How are you making me do this?"

"Can _you_ just shoot it point blank? Because I can't."

And obviously it's hard to just kill something when it's harmlessly asleep, looking like a huge beargorilladogorangutan and snuffling slightly. So Dean grits his teeth and keeps driving.

They heave the yeti out of the car and roll its pliant body into the boreal forest, leaving it in some territory that, according to Sam's research, it should thrive in. It takes them all goddamn day to get there, so even though they had hunted the thing in the morning, the sun is going down by the time they get back to the car. They sit on the hood for a breather, and unintentionally end up watching the sun set over the mountains. The pink light slanting across Sam's face makes him look like the most sincere person Dean has ever met, and when Sam turns and catches him gazing he forgets to be embarrassed.

* * *

The Monday after the whole yeti fiasco, Dean goes to work with a swollen bruise all over his face like he'd run into a brick wall. He can't even cover it with concealer because it hurts too much to touch.

Mr. Adler graciously says nothing all morning, but by lunchtime he can't seem to hold it in any longer. He knocks on the frame of Dean's office door and signals for Dean to wrap up his call.

"How can I help you?" Dean asks, hanging up the phone and trying not to tongue at the corner of his mouth where his lip is split and hasn't yet scabbed over.

"About the, uh…" Mr. Adler swirls a finger in the general direction of the whole left side of Dean's face.

"I fell down some stairs," Dean says.

Mr. Adler looks unconvinced. "Look, son, I've seen _Fight Club_ before, and if this is some kind of thing you're doing on your off time…"

"Then you know I can't talk about it," Dean jokes.

"Very amusing," Mr. Adler says, offering him a wan smile. "But I'm being serious, Dean. It's none of my business what you get up to on your off time but can't bring it back to the job. Imagine if you had to meet a client today. You look like a mess. You can do your underground boxing or whatever it is you're involved in, but it can't affect your performance at Sandover." _Consider this a warning_ , Mr. Adler doesn't say aloud. He doesn't need to.

Dean ducks his head, adjusts his tie and says, "Understood, sir."

Later, he texts Sam to ask ' _who do you think is hotter, Ed Norton or Brad Pitt?_ ' Sam's response is almost instantaneous, and says ' _edward norton all the way_.' Dean laughs under his breath and texts back ' _Good, because I think my boss thinks I'm playing his role._ '

* * *

They find their next hunt when a large telecommunications company starts reporting bizarre IT problems that Sam claims cannot possibly be IT problems.

"It's just not possible," he says, naked in Dean's bed and used condom still on his dick. "That's not how intranets work." He pulls off the condom and goes to the bathroom to throw it out. Dean has to yell to make sure Sam can still hear him call him a nerd.

Sam takes a flying leap back onto the bed, making both the bedsprings and Dean groan. "You don't get to laugh at me. I don't see your ability to convince shareholders to invest more money helping us with a case."

Dean has no clever retort because Sam starts kissing him, hard enough to make the still-healing bruise on his face ache.

It turns out Sam's right about the IT problems being supernatural. They wait for nightfall before breaking into the room that houses the company's server hardware, and there they find hobgoblins. Actual, honest to god hobgoblins, running around pulling out wires and wreaking havoc like they think they're in a b-horror movie from the eighties.

They have to be shot with arrows carved from the wood of a balsam poplar, and neither he nor Sam is particularly good at carpentry. Their homemade arrows aren't straight and don't fly true, which only exacerbates the fact that they're also not very good at archery. The goblins don't go down without a fight, either.

Sam is slightly more dextrous, but it takes Dean forever to re-notch a new arrow and just when he's got both hands busy a hobgoblin clinging from a light fixture takes a snarling, flying leap right onto his head. Instead of his life flashing before his eyes, Dean just has a continuous replay of Mr. Adler gravely shaking his head at the state of him and then telling him he's fired.

"No, not in the face!" Dean screeches, clawing at the hobgoblin until he realises he still has an arrow in one hand. He uses it like a dagger to stab the fucker and it works just as well as shooting it.

It doesn't take them long to clear the infestation once Dean figures out he can use the same arrow over and over to impale the hobgoblins, running them through like so many horrifying shish kebabs. Their bodies explode into some kind of light, smoky dust, luckily, so there's not a lot of cleanup once they're done. Aside from some minor scrapes and bruises and a fine layer of dead goblin dust that's settled over them like years of disuse, he and Sam are none the worse for wear.

On the way back to Sam's car, Sam nudges Dean's shoulder with his own and repeats "not in the faaaaaace!" in a high pitched voice that sounds nothing like Dean's. Dean, who had until that moment been thinking about offering Sam the first shower just to be a gentleman, decides that he wants to shower first after all. Sam can marinate in the goblin dust for all he cares.

* * *

It's been a few months and they've fallen into a routine, if indeed going off on weekend 'hunting trips' can be encompassed by a word as mundane as routine. At some point neither of them can remember, they began referring to their hobby as 'going paintballing,' so they can talk about it over lunch at work without seriously alarming their co-workers. Dean doesn't even like paintballing, but now everyone at Sandover who eavesdrops probably thinks he spends every waking moment of his free time shooting paint at the tall IT guy with the floppy hair. 

Dean likes routines, but not because he can't roll with spontaneity. The first few years out of business school basically consist of hazing—potential employers ask you ridiculous questions ("If you were a vegetable, what would you be and why?", "If this building were on fire and you could only save two things, what would they be?" or, and honest to god a hiring panel once asked Dean, "Can you name five Russian cities not including Moscow?") to see how well you deal with curveballs, and when you finally land a job you get handed all kinds of shit assignments with deadlines that change at the last minute and if you even think about complaining your supervisor just points to the part in your job description that says "adaptability is a necessary asset." So yeah, Dean can roll with the punches and he can handle surprises, but at the end of the day he likes structure. Routine. An overall sense of his place in the universe and what he's supposed to do. He can take it if an expected contract suddenly falls through, as long as he knows his job is ultimately to find a way to fix it. He can take it if an aspect of a hunt doesn't go as planned, as long as he's sure of the end goal of the hunt overall.

He's not sure he can handle it if there's no hunt at all.

"Are you sure?"

"I've checked all my RSS feeds five times over, Dean. Nothing suspicious in the area this week."

"But how can there be nothing? Is evil on a vacation? There has to be something going on somewhere."

Sam shrugs. "I'm sure there's _something_ going on _somewhere_ , but unless you want to expand our jurisdiction to halfway across the country there's really nothing that suits our—" Sam clears his throat as someone passes by their table to get some coffee. "Nothing that suits our unique paintball skillset."

Dean rolls his eyes. "Right. Well, I guess it was statistically unlikely for cases to keep matching up with our weekend schedules." 

"So, uh, did you still want to grab dinner tonight?" Sam asks, casually twirling his spoon between his fingers and looking just past Dean's ear.

"Sure, yeah. No reason why not." Just because they usually plan the weekend's hunt over Friday night dinner doesn't mean they can't find other things to talk about, right? They're in some kind of relationship after all, or at the very least they fuck on a regular basis and they're not seeing anyone else…they should have plenty to say to each other. Right?

They go to the sushi place Dean likes, because he's paying again. Sam accuses him of using the fact that he makes more money to hog the bill and therefore hog the privilege of choosing where they eat. The verbal tussle over Dean's wily bourgeois ways sustains them through drinks and appetizers and well into the main course. Dean notices that Sam's gotten good at using chopsticks, good enough to fold his pickled ginger in delicate layers, good enough to pick up the single grain of rice left sticking on his plate. The clink of wood on ceramic is unexpectedly loud once they stop talking.

When they run out of banter and don't have the logistics of a case to fall back on, Dean briefly, insanely, considers asking Sam one of those curveball interview questions just to provoke conversation.

He's saved from the embarrassment of doing so by Sam, who blurts out a much more inane question. "What's your favorite color?"

Dean raises his eyebrows. "Dude. Seriously?"

"What?" Sam asks, indignant and defensive even though his blush indicates he knows he should be embarrassed. "What if I need to buy you a tie or something? I should know."

"Please don't ever buy me a tie," Dean says. "I can't trust you to pick out something appropriate. Especially if you think all there is to it is _color_."

Sam presses his lips into a thin line, the way he does when he's annoyed at himself for not being more annoyed with Dean than he actually is. The way that makes his dimples stand out. "It's just…I don't know, it's not exactly something that comes up naturally in the car on our way to return a vengeful spirit's bones to sacred burial grounds, and it just seems like something I should know. Just say a color, Dean."

Dean sips at his _sake_ as slowly as he can, avoiding an answer, until Sam kicks him under the table. "I don't know, blue? I don't really care, Sammy." The nickname earns him another kick, sharper and right on the ankle this time. "They're just colors. I look good in blue so I have a lot of blue shirts. I don't know if that means blue's my favourite, but there you go."

"Light blue or dark blue?"

"Is this really happening right now?"

Sam heaves a sigh and they finish eating in silence.

Dean ends up giving in first because Sam has perfected the art of bitchface. He pays the bill and as they walk out of the restaurant he says, "Okay, fine, you win. What's _your_ favourite color, Sam?"

"Green," Sam answers, no hesitation. 

"I will keep that important information in mind. Are you going to ask me what my favourite flavour of ice cream is, next?"

"Oh screw you," Sam says, which turns out to be quite appropriate because they end up going back to Dean's condo and Sam does in fact end up screwing him. Twice.

They wake up the next morning without the need to pack supplies or load weapons, the whole day stretched out before them empty of any plans to unearth deadly mysteries and shoot things in the face with rock salt. It's off-putting. 

Since they don't need to eat fast and set out at the break of dawn, Sam makes a full breakfast and Dean resists the urge to follow him around his gorgeous kitchen with a scrubber, cleaning up the greasy mess he leaves behind as he makes it. It's a good breakfast. Dean doesn't touch the bacon because his metabolism isn't like Sam's—the guy can consume calories like nobody's business and sweat it all out at the gym, but Dean's gotta be careful of his own arteries. He does eat more than his share of the scrambled eggs, though, golden and fluffy and just a little bit burnt around the edges to give it a crunch, just the way he likes them. 

They take their coffee out to the balcony even though it's too cold to actually do that, but it's nice. Dean can't remember the last time he ever sat out on his balcony, isn't sure he's ever really had the urge before. 

It's noon by the time they go back inside, fingers numb around their ceramic mugs and mouths sour with the aftertaste of long-gone coffee. Dean's internal alarms are screaming at him for wasting the morning, continue to scream suggestions for productive ways to salvage the rest of the day. If he's not hunting, he could be reviewing his stock portfolio, exercising, clearing out the folder in his email that he's named 'delete after final review', pick up the blazer he's left at the dry cleaner's for months, get a start organizing next week's budget meeting—

What Dean does, instead, is bend Sam over the sink after they're both done brushing their teeth and rim him until he comes with just the barest brush of fingers against his cock. And then he brushes his teeth again, because he's not gross. And he uses a paper towel to wipe away the streaks of pearly white Sam's left on the cabinet doors under the sink. And then he throws the wad of paper towel at Sam's head, because okay, maybe he's a little bit gross.

Once all the newspaper-reading and television-watching and around-the-condo-lazing possibilities have been exhausted, they eventually venture outside. Sam awkwardly asks Dean if he wants to get some frozen yogourt (he asks if Dean wants to get some ice cream, at first, and then at the look on Dean's face quickly amends it to something more appropriately yuppie) and take a walk in the park. It occurs to Dean that they're not really any good at normal dates. It occurs to Dean that Sam was a lot less awkward asking him out when he used ghost-hunting dreams as a pickup line.

There's a lot of stilted conversation, fumbling half-attempts at holding hands that make Dean feel like he has the clumsiest fingers in the world, and sitting on park benches and clearing their throats repeatedly because they can't seem to think of anything to say and feel too self-conscious to gaze into each other's eyes.

Despite their obvious discomfort, neither of them suggests calling it a day and parting ways, which must count for something.

And despite several moments that seemed to drag excruciatingly on into eternity, the day flies by and before they know it night has fallen again and they're back to 69ing on Dean's bed. When they're done, Dean's neck is sore from cricking it at a weird angle, his jaw is sore from accommodating Sam's dick, and even his arms are sore from holding down Sam's strong legs because Sam tended to get a little clampy when he got excited and Dean didn't want to die being strangled by Sam's thighs. 

He takes the bathroom first, as is his wont, and by the time he rolls back into bed he feels pleasantly lethargic from doing a whole lot of nothing all day and is ready to fall right asleep. Sam gets up; he doesn't close the bathroom door all the way, not shy since Dean has seen everything there is to see already. Through the crack in the door, through his haze of near-slumber, Dean can hear Sam's cell phone ring. 

"Hello? Mom? No, sorry, I'm at Dean's tonight…I'll look for it tomorrow, okay? Okay. Love you too. Bye, Mom."

From the way Sam doesn't have to explain who 'Dean' is or why he's spending the night at his place, Dean can tell that Sam has told his mom about him before.

Dean has not told his dad about Sam. For a brief moment, he wonders if he should. But what would he even say? No, I haven't been seeing him for very long; no, we aren't moving in together; no, neither of us has a terminal illness; no, I don't want you to meet him; no, we haven't talked about our future together; no, I've never called you for no reason just to chat about the people I'm dating before. That'll go over well. John wouldn't approve of Sam, anyway—not because he's a man, of course, but because he's a lowly tech support guy at Dean's own company. His father has always held Dean up to terrifyingly high standards, but it's the only way he's ever known how to take care of Dean on his own. Yet Dean knows, deep in his gut, somehow, that Sam is different from all the others that he's never called his dad to chat about before, but he's not sure exactly how and he can't tell John that it's because they hunt ghosts together.

So he rolls over and by sheer force of will makes himself fall asleep before Sam crawls back into bed.

* * *

Something's off. This is supposed to be just a casual thing they do on the weekends, a hobby, maybe with slightly higher stakes than most casual hobbies but not much more emotional investment. He means the hunting, of course—Dean has an impressive capacity for self-delusion, but even he can no longer pretend that his relationship with Sam is just something to amuse themselves with on the weekends. But the hunting, that's just for fun. It's a bit of an adrenaline kick, a little danger to dilute the banality of everyday life, the same reason other people go rock-climbing. This new case they're working feels nothing like rock-climbing. Something is definitely off.

"And according to this book, the possessed human vessel remains conscious of what's happening, trapped inside their own body. Exorcising the demon returns the body to its mortal state, and most people die from the injuries they suffered while possessed," Sam reads out loud to Dean with wide eyes.

"Shit," Dean breathes.

"Pretty much, yeah."

Dean did not sign up for this. "Are we sure that's what happening? I mean, we've seen some crazy stuff, but _demons_?"

"All the lore fits."

"But, I mean, _demons_? Not just a run of the mill vengeful spirit, but a Roman Catholic demon, with the Vulgate Bible and holy water and everything. I mean, fuck, Sammy, I'm not even Christian."

Sam bites his lip, looks just as hesitant as Dean feels.

"I think this might be over our heads," Dean says. He signed up to gank a few trolls making companies go haywire, maybe salt and burn a dead CEO or two—he didn't sign up to confront the place of mankind in the cosmic enigma of good versus evil or whatever. 

"Well, we don't have to do it," Sam says. "We can walk away, or find a different case, or try some actual paintballing for once."

Dean hisses out a sigh between his teeth. He can tell Sam doesn't want to walk away. He wouldn't have offered paintballing as an alternative if he wanted Dean to consider it. Dean fucking hates paintball. "We can't just bail on these people now that we know what's wrong, can we?" 

Sam smiles at Dean like it was a test all along and Dean got the right answer. "We'll go check it out, see what we can do, and play it by ear," Sam says, already heading out the door with half-baked plans brewing in his head. "I know how we can get holy water."

Which is how they end up two states away, in a cellar with Latinate symbols scratched into its dirt floor, the broken shell of a man chained to a chair in front of them while something blacker than night writhes behind his eyes. He, or it, or they, he spits and snarls about the end of the world and all the things Lucifer will rain down upon them, and if Dean had any doubt before he's a hundred percent sure now: they're in over their heads.

Sam clutches his copy of the Vulgate and Dean knows he'd agree if he weren't allergic to admitting he's wrong. Theirs is the desperation of those who want to back out but know they can't, know it's too late. They don't know what the right thing to do is—they don't know if exorcising the demon would kill the host, if sending the demon back to Hell would help the world or not, if Hell even really exists. They just know they have to decide to do something, and soon, because they did a shoddy job of blessing those chains and the possessed man is going to wriggle out any time now.

Sam clears his throat, but before he says a word three people come crashing down the stairs of the cellar. Dean spins, doesn't know which one he should train his gun on.

One woman and two men, all looking like a burly combination of truckers plus extreme camping enthusiasts. They're armed to the gills, guns and knives that make his and Sam's look like playthings. They're also clutching rosaries, vials of holy water and some sort of book with scribbles Dean can't decipher. It looks old. 

"You boys Sam Wesson and Dean Smith?" one of the men asks. His voice doesn't sound as rough as Dean expects. It almost sounds like his dad's voice.

"Who wants to know?" Sam replies in his tech support voice. Neutral, polite, I'm-here-to-help, I'm-on-your-side, designed to disarm threats and anger. 

The three strangers interpret this as a 'yes.' "Your names have been going around the usual roadhouses," the woman says, like she expects them to know what she's talking about. "You've been taking on the small fish, picking up the boring corporate cases no one else wants to do."

Sam and Dean exchange glances. Other hunters. Not the most surprising revelation in the universe—after all, they learned from the website of other hunters themselves. There must be networks, whole communities of them out there. Communities they've been semi-consciously avoiding, or at least not going out of their way to find, because they haven't been trying to make hunting a lifestyle choice.

"This is a bit different than you usual stuff, isn't it?" She inclines her head toward the demon.

Dean notices that, for the first time since he and Sam captured it, it's fallen silent. It visibly shrinks away from the three new hunters. It wasn't afraid of Sam or Dean, not even for a brief second, but now it's making a judgement call about the other hunters and it doesn't like what it sees.

"We…miscalculated," Dean says.

"Bit off more than you can chew?" The first guy, the oldest of the three, chuckles.

Dean shrugs. Sam shrugs.

"We kind of figured," he says. "We're here to take the problem off your hands, if you want. Your call. It's your hunt, your choice if you wanna let us finish it for you, or if you want to do it yourselves. Hell, if you want you can stay while we off him and take it as a learning opportunity."

Sam looks at Dean. Dean doesn't _want_ to learn how to 'off' a demon. There are some things he wants to achieve to improve his life, and getting involved in a holy war between sacred and demonic forces will never ever be one of them. But they're a partnership, and Dean doesn't want to unilaterally make the decision for Sam. So he does his best to school his expression into blankness and looks evenly back at Sam.

Sam's eyes pass over Dean's face the way they pass over a magazine when he's reading, darting minutely back and forth. Whatever he sees makes him nod.

"We'll let you take it from here," Sam announces. 

The veteran hunter sighs and it's impossible to tell if he's disappointed or relieved. "Oh well," he says, "it's probably just as well. Not everybody's cut out for the same kind of jobs. If they were then the stuff you boys do would never get done. Division of labour, and all that." He shakes their hands and claps them both paternally on the shoulders as they leave.

They walk away as quickly as they can and try not to hear any of the sounds coming from the cellar behind them.

It's still early Saturday evening, practically afternoon still. They have half the weekend left open in front of them and Dean's hands are shaking too hard to drive all the way back home. 

"What do you say we go book the most expensive suite in the most expensive hotel we can find in the nearest city and order champagne and fuck until we forget what a demon even looks like?"

"God, that sounds good." Sam slings a heavy arm around Dean and laughs. "I could get used to having a rich boyfriend."

Instead of overthinking the casual way Sam throws out the word 'boyfriend,' Dean just says, "And you said I shouldn't bring my credit cards out on hunts," and congratulates himself for deciding to bring his platinum card after all.

* * *

Sam keeps some of his clothes at Dean's place. Sometimes their hunts run late on Sundays and it's more convenient to go to work the next morning straight from Dean's. Sometimes they want to get an early start on a case on Saturdays and it makes more sense to set out together from Dean's. And sometimes Sam will stay overnight on a Wednesday or Thursday, just because.

Dean has been to Sam's apartment, but he rarely stays over. It's small and cluttered and the ceiling is weirdly low. There's barely enough room for Sam and his roommate Ash and all their videogames, and one more person tips the space from cozy to cramped. Ash is cool but he isn't interested in hearing his roommate give head, so out of respect and personal awkwardness Dean always keeps his clothes on in Sam's room. If they're just going to sleep, though, Dean prefers his own bed, bigger and sturdier and nicer than Sam's. He's not even being snobbish—his bed is objectively nicer than Sam's, and Sam finds himself spending more time in it.

Watching Sam pull his work shirt on over his head one morning, his abs flexing before the cheap yellow cotton blend covers his stomach, Dean says, "It's not that I haven't thought about asking you to move in." It's a Thursday morning. It seemed like the right time to bring it up, but Dean's not always the best at judging these things.

Sam says, "O…kay?" and just waits.

"It's just that I like this place. I like the view and the underground parking and the stainless steel appliances and I like decorating with glass sculptures that I don't really understand. And the monthly lease costs more than your whole paycheque."

"You don't want me to move in because I'm too poor for you?" Sam's not angry, yet, but he sounds like he's willing to work himself up to it. He's also taking it wrong, because that's not what Dean meant, exactly.

"No, it's not—I don't care, you can live here for free if you want. But I've thought about it and it's like…I don't want to put you in a position where your two choices are to either blow a lot of money you don't have or feel like you're living off someone else's charity. I don't mind, but I get the feeling you would mind."

"So you're not being a dick, you're being considerate."

"Look, whatever, I'm sorry I brought it up. I just thought maybe you were wondering why—"

"No, Dean, I didn't mean 'considerate' sarcastically." Sam puts a hand on the small of Dean's back. 

"Well okay then." Dean goes to stick two bagels in the toaster and they don't talk again through breakfast, but it's a companionable silence and Sam rubs his foot with his own under the table until they have to leave for work.

* * *

An amateur witch hexes an entire law firm into making terrible, terrible judgement calls. Dealing with the witch isn't too hard—she's already sorry before they even confront her, and together they burn the book of spells that some recruiter for the dark side gave her. But then they have to clean up her mess afterwards.

"How many hex bags did she say again?"

"One hundred seventy-three," Sam replies with a sigh. 

Not that Dean doesn't know the answer already. He just keeps asking in the hopes that he somehow heard wrong, or remembered wrong, or something. Because finding one hundred and seventy-three tiny little pouches hidden throughout four floors of an office building is not anyone's idea of a good time.

Sam boosts him up so he can look into an air vent, flashlight clamped between his teeth and cobwebs getting into his hair. It smells old and dusty and slightly more like rotting bones than a good air vent should. Dean locates a tied bundle tucked behind the grate and brings it down with him. They unwrap the oilcloth to see coins and hair and bird bones with flesh still clinging to the sides, and after they burn it Dean wipes his hands on Sam's jacket.

The witch told them more or less where all the hex bags were, but they still have to sweep the place carefully and nothing but good old fashioned elbow grease would get the job done. After five hours of dedicated searching, they're just over half done and the mind-numbing boredom starts to set in. It's practically a relief, something to get the blood jumping, when the next door they open brings them face to face with the barrel of a gun.

"Oh, it's you," the owner of the gun says, and then there's the sound of the safety clicking back on and a woman's voice behind him says, "Who?"

"The Smith and Wesson boys," replies the old hunter from the demon job Sam and Dean ended up skipping out on. The third hunter isn't with them. He returns his gun to his holster and nods at them in greeting.

"You boys working this case already?" the woman asks.

"Talked to the witch who hexed this place, burned the spell book she used, and now we're getting rid of the hex bags," Dean confirms. "Ninety-eight down, seventy-five to go."

"Oh good," she says. "We found five of them, so you can add that to your total. And now that we know you're on this, we'll leave you to it. There's been reported sightings of the Jersey Devil and we need to get on that." She pats them on the shoulder as she walks past them.

"It's good to know you guys are there for these kinds of cases, you know? Stuff that's not really our speed but that someone needs to take care of?" The other hunter tips his frayed ball cap at them as he follows the woman out.

"Is that our thing now?" Dean asks Sam once they're gone. "Are we the guys who do the boring jobs no one else wants to do so the real hunters can go after the real monsters? Is that what we're known for?"

"I guess. I don't know, isn't it good to know that we're actually helping out the cause, though? Like, we thought we were just doing this for fun and maybe saving a few people along the way, but it turns out there's a whole association of hunters out there fighting evil and we play a part in helping it run."

"Oh my god. We're the tech support of hunting," Dean groans.

Sam shoves him from behind, hard. "Let's see you make fun of techies the next time you can't get your Blackberry to work, asshole."

They carry on teasing and shoving each other as they work their way through the office, until they're sure they've destroyed every last hex bag. And, because Dean has always wanted to in his own office but can't, he gets Sam to bend him over the big glass desk in a senior partner's office and fuck him until he can't speak anymore.

* * *

Sam doesn't tell him until they're done their next hunt that he chose this specific case partially because it would take them close to where his mom lives.

"I thought, hey, two birds, one stone, we could drop by afterwards and pay her a visit," he says, all faux casual like he isn't bringing Dean to meet his mother for the first time.

Dean is sweaty and slightly slimy from their hunt, he doesn't have a change of clothes and he's sure his hair looks like a mess. "You could've at least warned me, let me pack a tie," he grumbles.

"My mom doesn't care if you're wearing a tie. I was afraid if I told you first, you might not want to go." The line of Sam's back is rigid and straight.

Dean pauses in his frantic struggle to make himself look presentable in the reflection of Sam's pull-down visor mirror. He's not sure what to say to that, so he settles for, "You're right, kidnapping me is a lot better than asking. Who needs to make a good impression for their boyfriend's mom anyway? It's not like her opinion matters and I need to prepare or anything."

They don't use the word 'boyfriend' very often, or at all. It makes Sam relax in the driver's seat a bit, makes him smile at the open road in front of him as he says, "We can stop at a gas station before we hit town and you can fix yourself up in the bathroom."

In the end, Dean makes him stop at a liquor store instead, where the bathroom is grosser but he can get a bottle of wine to give Sam's mom. Whom he's meeting. Now. He spends longer in the gross bathroom than he normally would, finger-combing water through his hair.

Mary Wesson is an environmental lawyer with a firm handshake and deep lines around her mouth. She wraps Sam up in her arms and somehow manages to make him look small, even though Sam is a good head and a half taller than her. She's ordered dinner delivered because she can't cook, but she's still very much a matriarch in an almost archetypal way. Dean forgets if 'archetypal' is actually the right word, but he means that Mary is a _mother_ , the way Dean has imagined how a mother might be, from the books and TV shows he consumed as a child.

Dean catches her sweeping the occasional appraising look across him as they eat, but mostly she listens to Sam talk about his day-to-day life and looks genuinely interested when Sam explains the new project launch for state-wide automated telephone protocols. Sam avoids the subject of hunting or 'paintballing' entirely, and Dean takes that as a cue to not bring it up himself. Mary seems to be under the impression that they met at an office party.

The mundane conversation between Sam and his mother is natural, easy, and Dean sits back with his wine to let it wash over him like live jazz at an upscale restaurant. He can't imagine talking like this with his dad, who abhors talking just for the sake of talking, but then again he also can't imagine wanting to. It makes him feel awkward and untrained for talking to Mary, as though she expects him to know how to ask questions that keep a conversation flowing when he really doesn't. He asks why he's never heard Sam talk about his dad before, and he knows right away that it's an inappropriate thing to bring up.

But Mary just takes it in stride, pours Dean some more wine while she answers without a hitch, like she sees Dean as someone who has a right to know about her family like that.

"He left when Sam was just a boy—we married too young. No hard feelings. We just didn't work out. He sent money and remembered all of Sam's birthdays."

Dean takes in the curve of Sam's jaw and isn't so sure there are no hard feelings. Dean's own mom died when he was just a baby; he doesn't even have a single memory of her. It's like he and Sam are puzzle pieces, with the same jagged edge of an absent parent torn away, and maybe their jigsaw sides will fit together or maybe if they just jam them together hard enough they can make them fit regardless.

Mary gets on his case when they talk about cars and he mentions thinking about trading up for something fancier than his current hybrid Prius.

"Fancier, how?" she asks sharply.

"Like, more reflective of my tax bracket," Dean says. They're done dinner and Sam's clearing away the plates. Mary waves at Dean to sit back down when he gets up to help him.

"I hope you realise," she says, and Dean can't tell if that's her environmental lawyer voice or her mom voice or if she just uses her mom voice in court, "that even if you can afford to drive an oil-guzzling Escalade, our planet can't afford it."

"No, I would never—obviously I would still get a hybrid. I've been looking at some of the ones Porsche puts out, and I was thinking, I don't know, maybe I'm interested. But I also read a few articles about how hybrid cars might end up being worse than a regular car? Like, something about the environmental costs of producing the lithium ion batteries?" Actually, Mary is probably a font of knowledge in this area, and Dean can probably consult her expertise, seeing as the issue is genuinely something that's been weighing on his mind.

Mary gives Sam look full of motherly significance, tips her head toward Dean and raises her eyebrows at Sam, before launching into a full run-down of the pros and cons of electric cars.

* * *

The difference between Dean and Sam is that Sam hunts monsters like he's been waiting twenty-seven years for his life to start and now it's finally happened, whereas Dean doesn't. Dean maybe shouldn't have expressed this sentiment out loud, in the form of yelling, to Sam's face as they're having a disagreement about whether to go on a hunt one weekend.

Dean's under a tight deadline to get three different reports in, and he knows he has to work overtime all weekend to make it. He's the first in the running for the Senior VP Eastern Great Lakes Division position that's about to open up when Sanchez either retires or conks it, which should be any day now. If he plays all his cards right, his career for the next ten years will be secure. He really, really doesn't have time to purge a vengeful banshee from a real estate office right now.

Sam's angry and earnest in that way that he gets when he's talking about Evil with a capital E, and he spits about how the most insignificant job they could ever take on would still be more important in the grand scheme of the world than anything Dean does for work, which is when Dean yells in his face about how, unlike Sam, Dean had never felt like working at Sandover was settling.

"This _is_ my life, and this is my job, and I'm damn good at it, and even if I never salt and burn another corpse again I'll still be proud of coordinating the biggest marketing deal Sandover has ever signed, and if that's not good enough for you then maybe you should go find one of those roadhouses where the real hunters hang out."

"And what, pick a new hunting partner there?"

Dean double checks to make sure all of his spreadsheets have been saved to both his harddrive and his USB key. "I don't know, Sammy. Is that what you want to do?"

Sam bites the hangnails off his thumb and doesn't answer. He's sitting across the table from Dean, his own laptop open and browsing whatever Google alerts he's set up to help them find cases. He's shirtless and wearing yesterday's boxers, half-eaten cereal going soggy in its bowl next to his keyboard. He slams his finger on the down arrow with a lot more force than necessary for the next few minutes.

They're on the edge of something precarious, somewhere Dean doesn't want to go because he's half afraid he'll find out they were there all along. He thinks, maybe, or he feels, maybe, that he and Sam are together for reasons beyond a mutual interest in stopping ghosts from attacking people. But he's never asked Sam and what if he doesn’t thinkfeelmaybe the same?

He looks at Sam until he gets tired of being ignored and then he goes back to his spreadsheets, because he wasn't joking about needing to get this shit done. If Sam walks out right now, then…then he doesn't even know, because his job is more important to him than a hunt but if Sam goes on a hunt alone he might get hurt and Sam's more important to him than his job but if it comes to that he might lose Sam anyway because he doesn't think he'll be able to keep looking at Sam if Sam forces his hand like that.

When Sam finally gets up, Dean almost jumps from his seat too, wound so tight with imagining what Sam might do next.

What Sam does next is rinse his bowl out in the sink carefully before putting it top down on the back of the drying rack, just as Dean likes it.

"So, are you heading out then?" Dean gives into the temptation to ask.

Sam doesn't deign to answer him. He stomps into the bedroom and closes the door. Dean thinks for a few heart-wrenching minutes that Sam might be packing his duffle bag, stuffing it with a change of clothes and their guns and reference books and rosaries. But the minutes pass and Sam doesn't come back out of the bedroom and then Dean is working on his reports again. 

In a few hours, he's ready to submit one and has made decent headway on the other two. He stands up to stretch, and then he's knocking on his own bedroom door like it doesn't belong to him. 

"It's open," Sam says, sounding like he's lying face down on a pillow.

Dean walks in.

"I shouldn't have said that thing about you waiting for your life to start," Dean says. Because he shouldn't have.

"No, you shouldn't."

Dean sits down on the bed. His bed. Their bed. 

"I like my job too," Sam turns his head to say to Dean.

"I know you do. You get to go on that 4Chan blog thing while you passive-aggressively imply people are stupid for not knowing how to work their printer."

Sam smiles a little at that.

"When my dad was my age, he was already the CEO of his own startup," Dean says. He can see Sam's hand creeping its way across the sheet to meet his in his peripheral vision. 

"Is that what you want?" Sam asks. 

"To be a CEO?"

"To make him proud?"

Dean looks at their overlapping hands. "I think I just want to be Senior VP Eastern Great Lakes Division, get six weeks of vacation a year and a sweet Christmas bonus. I'll finally take time off for the first time in I don't even know how long, and I'll take you to Delaware."

Sam wrinkles his nose. "What the hell's in Delaware?"

"My dad."

Dean sits with Sam until he starts feeling sleepy and remembers he can't afford to take a nap right now. He still has two more reports to finish and he wants to know that Sam won't go hunting without him but he doesn't know how to ask.

Sam solves the dilemma for him by making no attempts whatsoever to put on a shirt. He cooks dinner bare-chested while Dean works at the dining table, and Dean's so relieved that he doesn't even make a housewife joke.

* * *

Dean has a video conference first thing Monday morning, and he doesn't even care if Sam laughs at him for this but he needs to not get any visible injuries because neither Mr. Adler nor the exec from their potential Tokyo partnership will be impressed if he looks like anything less than a well-oiled profit-generating machine. 

"Not in the face, not in the face, not in the face," Dean mutters under his breath like a mantra as they tramp through the snow, looking for some kind of trickster gargoyle thing that's been blowing darts into people's tires from high up in the trees. Nasty little prank when it's done to parked cars, but deadly now that it's moved next to the highway. 

When Sam finally overhears him, he snorts and then says, "You didn't mind getting it in the face last night," and waggles his eyebrows suggestively.

Dean makes a disgusted noise, shoves him, groans, is annoyed, calls him a jerk, does anything but let on the fact that it's so not the appropriate time or place but he's suddenly kind of turned on.

They find the Trickster Gargoyle Thing, but not before it finds them. It rains a shower of darts, rocks, and various other projectiles on them as they duck under the overhang of a collapsing, old, abandoned shack. According to Sam's geekery, they need to shatter the trickster with a hammer that they have (or Sam has, mostly, to be honest) carved with Enochian symbols. Dean is willing to concede that Sam has better aim, so they decide that Dean should be the one to distract it while Sam throws the hammer at it. 

The next few minutes are a blur that of course culminates in a baseball-sized rock hurtling straight towards Dean's face, because that's just how these things go. He has the time to think "oh fucking—" and feel a sense of resignation before Sam tackles him out of the way and gets smashed on the side of the head with the rock for his troubles. There's some mad scrabbling around in the snow for the dropped hammer, a high-speed chase as the trickster decides to make a run for it by vaulting through the trees like a freaking spider monkey, a few tumbles as they trip over themselves trying not to lose the damn thing. There's a brief three-second window, between one tree and another quite far away, when the trickster has to pause and gather itself for the leap. Sam pulls his arm back and aims, releases, and it's a beautiful throw despite the fact that he possibly has a concussion. It lands true, the trickster shatters, and Dean is so impressed by it all that he almost forgets to be impressed by the other thing. The thing where Sam kept him from being hit in the face with a rock at the expense of his own body. 

On the way home, Dean insists on taking a detour to a walk-in clinic to get Sam's head checked out. 

"I'm fine," Sam says, rolling his eyes and batting Dean away. "I know how I feel, I would know if I had a concussion."

"What is even the point of having great healthcare if you never use it?" Dean retorts, because Sandover takes good care of all its worker bees. 

In the end, Dean gets his way, and after two hours of waiting the nice nurse sends them on their way with some acetaminophen and instructions for icing the lump forming on the back of his head. 

Dean comes out of the shower to find Sam already curled up in bed even though it's barely past eight. He crawls on his knees toward Sam, lays his hand over the icepack Sam is holding against his head, pries it away enough for him to lean down and press a soft kiss to his skull before putting the icepack back in its place.

He has nothing to say, doesn't know if 'thanks' will just make him sound like a dork, doesn't know if Sam was even really thinking about Dean's priorities or if he had just acted instinctively. 

"You're gonna kill it at that meeting tomorrow," Sam murmurs sleepily, shifting so he can wedge the icepack between the pillow and his head, pulling blankets sloppily up around himself and closing his eyes.

Dean doesn't reply, just smoothes the rumpled sheets and tucks the blankets around Sam tightly.

* * *

"The rental-purchase option's coming up on my lease soon," Dean says one morning. A Wednesday.

"Cool story?"

"I can either buy this place outright or end the contract."

Sam waits for Dean to elaborate.

"I'm thinking of maybe ending the contract. And looking for a new place. A cheaper place, maybe. Where you can afford half the payments."

Sam has visible trouble swallowing the last of his banana. "I thought you liked the view here."

"I do. But there are other views. This city has more than one place that looks nice. And I figure with the money I'll be saving up, we could afford a down payment on a townhouse or something soon enough. You know. If we wanted to become homeowners. Together."

Sam stares. "Yeah, I guess that sounds—"

"And, like, you're never at your own place anymore so you're kind of throwing away money on the rent at this point, and I'm pretty sure Ash's girlfriend has practically moved in with him at this point, so they probably wouldn't mind the extra room. He might be starting to get suspicious of how we never have paint on our clothes, anyway, and I think he might freak out big time if he ever finds your guns and ammo stash, and—"

"Dean—"

"Look, I'm just spitballing here, you don't have to or anything. I do like this place a lot but I'm just saying I could use a change." Dean pauses, not to acknowledge that Sam has been trying to reply, but to take nervous sips of coffee.

Sam walks over to where he's standing against the counter and takes Dean's mug out of his hand. He rests one hand on Dean's hip and sets the mug aside with his other hand, far out of Dean's reach. "If you'd listen to me for a second, you'd realise I already said yeah."

Dean leans back to look up at Sam, eyes narrowed, assessing. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

So Dean makes a mental note to call John and tell him about Sam, about how they're moving in together, about their relationship and the whole situation, obviously not the _whole_ situation with the hunting and the monsters but about how they met at work and have similar hobbies and are kind of maybe probably in love. He definitely won't tell his dad about the way Sam's eyes crinkle when he smiles just before dropping to his knees and giving Dean the perfect pre-work morning blowjob, or about how he doesn't mind the taste of Sam's kiss even when he doesn't immediately rinse his mouth after, but if his dad asks him if he's sure (because John Smith would never ask him something as plebeian as 'are you happy'—he'd say 'are you sure' but Dean will know what he means) he'll say yes. Yes.

*end

**Author's Note:**

> first posted to livejournal on feb-12-2012

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] When We Kiss Our Scars Align](https://archiveofourown.org/works/602753) by [applegeuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegeuse/pseuds/applegeuse)




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